Fifty Ways to Sell Your Misunderstood Wine

Last week I wrote about two “misunderstood” or maybe “misunderappreciated” wines — Riesling and Oregon Pinot Gris — and the conferences that Sue and I attended where the problem of marketing them was discussed. This week I report on those discussions and try to draw some conclusions.

Identity Crisis

So how do you get consumers to buy wines that they don’t necessarily completely understand or fully appreciate? Well, perhaps predictably the discussions at both the Oregon Pinot Gris Symposium and Riesling Rendezvous turned early on to the idea of a cool motto — the “Got Milk?” killer tagline for their respective wines.

This always seems to happen when wine people get together to talk category marketing despite the fact that there are darn few generic marketing slogans that have had much impact on sales (how many can you think of?) and even fewer when it comes to wine. I used to think that this discussion was simply a waste of time, but now I recognize that the function is not so much to bring in consumers as to give wineries and distributors a rallying cry. No harm in that, so long as the slogan isn’t offensive, and it might even be useful.

Chateau Ste Michelle CEO Ted Baseler proposed “Right On, Riesling!” and that seems fine — certainly better than the vaguely suggestive “Riesling: Just Put It In Your Mouth” that one break-out group played with for a while during a discussion of how consumer perceptions change when they actually taste different Riesling styles.

Similarly, the Oregon group settled on “Oregon, Get Your Gris On!” for a summer campaign, which I prefer to “Fifty Shades of Gris,” which may be more descriptive of the wide range of styles of Oregon Pinot Gris, but is a bit too reminiscent of the title of a recently popular erotic novel.

Radar Love

Fortunately, the discussions soon turned to what I see as more substantive ideas. Riesling Rendezvous panelist Blake Gray (of The Gray Report) offered the very useful suggestion that efforts to bring new wine drinkers into the Riesling camp should perhaps be secondary to strategies to get consumers who already know and like Riesling to drink more of it. Riesling is already on their radar, so they are your best prospects for increased sales.

This idea is particularly relevant for Riesling because research reported at the conference suggested that Riesling lovers don’t focus on their favorite wine with quite the intensity as Sauvignon Blanc followers, for example. I’ll bet this is true for Pinot Gris consumers, too.

So how do you do that? Well, I’m not quite sure (although I have ideas — I think the Summer of Riesling project is terrific), but the point is that it is a different problem than trying to convert consumers who don’t currently drink Riesling either because they don’t know it yet or because they were unhappy with a previous Riesling experience. Current drinkers are known knowns, as one former Bush-era official might have said. The non-drinkers have many unknown unknowns and that’s a different problem.

There Must Be 50 Ways

But even if increasing consumption by current buyers should be the number one priority for both Riesling and Oregon Pinot Gris, that doesn’t mean that the rest of the market is unimportant. So how do you win them over? Well, it seems to me that the examples of Ernst Loosen (in the Riesling group) and David Adelsheim (at the Oregon Pinot Gris symposium) are instructive. Ernie and David have worked tirelessly to promote their wines. I can’t imagine how many times they (and their colleagues at other wineries) have poured the wines, told the stories, answered the questions and then gone on to do it all again.

There isn’t any one way to build a market for a misunderstood or misunderappreciated wine — no silver bullet as we say in the U.S. And it’s not really rocket science either, despite what that mashed up Einstein photo above seems to suggest. There must be 50 ways (or 500), but they all seem to boil down to hard work that is done one glass and one consumer at a time (leveraged by whatever peer-to-peer social media effects you can muster and of course beneficial media attention). Unite behind whatever rally cry works for you, residents of Planet Riesling and people of Oregon Pinot Gris, because there really is strength in numbers, and get on to the hard work.

Do Think Twice (About Price)

But this still leaves the problem of price which, as you may remember from last week’s column, is the sticking point for Oregon Pinot Gris. The difficulty of raising price is seen by at least some Oregon producers as an obstacle to raising quality and assuring a sustainable future.

Raising price, especially in the face of rising costs, is a problem all right, but not exclusively a problem for Oregon Pinot Gris or even for wine. Many business sectors struggle to find a way to pass on costs to distributors and final purchasers, as a recent “Schumpeter” column in the Economist magazine makes clear.

Many businesses, the Schumpeter columnist writes, have prices but not a pricing strategy or, if they do, it is determined at a low level in the business structure (perhaps because selling stuff isn’t always given a high priority compared with making stuff or organizing the business). Sometimes prices are “eye-balled” based on intuition rather than carefully calculated or strategically set.

It wouldn’t be fair to pick on Oregon Pinot Gris when it comes to pricing strategy, since this is a general issue, but it is probably true that improvements could be made. Purchasers generally see Pinot Gris in the context of other Oregon wines, especially Pinot Noir, so that a joint pricing strategy is probably necessary to account for the complex complement and substitution effects.

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The British economist economist John Maynard Keynes famously took an interest in the pricing of Champagne in the bar at the Cambridge Arts Theatre where his wife, the Russian ballerina Lydia Lopokova, often danced. As chair of the theater’s board, Keynes would have to help fund the inevitable operating deficit, so anything that increased revenues was highly desired.

Keynes wanted to nudge patrons to move up to the better Champagne on the bar menu, where profit margins were higher. His strategy? Not to cut the price of the good stuff in an attempt to sell more, which he had reason to think wouldn’t work because of inelastic demand. And not to raise the better wine’s price, which was sure to make enemies. Instead he pressured the bar manager to raise the price of the ordinary product, thereby lowering the relative cost of the upgrade to the better Champagne that he suspected many patrons secretly desired.

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6 responses

I’ve transfered the same to my hard work of introducing my boutique, rare, fine wines into the USA market and I see very clearly the last paragraph. The problem is that we may not be able to make other stuff be increased to favour our prices based on quality. Generally speaking and from my point of view, last consumer moves by price while wine enthusiast consumer moves by quality; and this is what they should be looking for when trying to make more popular Riesling, Pinot Noir or no matter what varietal of wine; I’m afraid we must talk of wine made with “gusto” and wine for just consumption to huge public.

Really enjoy your article and Wine Wars. As a budding winemaker and economics hobbyist the insights are enjoyable. But Keynes?! I can only hope the next article delves into price and production by Hayek. At the very least, an asterisk to clarify that Keynes was more of a celebrity than an economist. Kidding aside, keep up the good work!

Thanks for both of your stories about our struggles, Mike. On July 23, we did the same thing again, similar to Oregon Pinot Gris, except this time it was for marketing Petite Sirah. Now, I have to gather what was said for both and produce my own thoughts. Let’s just say, it’s not an easy task, regardless of the cultivar.

Rieslings can be sweet, dry or off-dry. How can someone who likes one style know what a wine is like if there’s no indication on a label? And even if there is, different wineries may have different ideas on what each style should be like. And why Pinot Gris isn’t popular may simply be a matter of its name. Pinot Grigio is quite popular. And it’s the same grape.

Why the fuss over getting people to drink what they don’t want? W. Blake Gray is probably correct. Sell Riesling to people who like it.

Hi Mike, like your blogs and Wine War. As a new wine enthusiast and student, my 1st epiphany wine was a Riesling – Letz Trocken. I did not know that a wine could taste so wonderful! So what I knew about Riesling then was that it was dry and it was delicious, until I ordered Riesling in a restaurant. Your were right – the 1st sip, it was unpleasantly sweet and flabby which completely damaged my impression about Riesling at that time. Since then, I never ordered Riesling in a restaurant. As a lesson, I wonder if it helps to ask the restaurants and retailers to specify the sweetness under the wine name/brand. I believe most consumers, intimidated by the confusing wine labels, will be easily and happily accept the help of a simple description to the wine.

The Wine Economist

What would you get if you crossed the Wine Spectator, America's best-selling wine magazine, with the Economist, the world's leading business weekly? The answer is this blog, The Wine Economist, which analyzes and interprets today's global wine markets. The Wine Economist was named 2015 "Best in the World" wine blog by Gourmand International. Staff: Mike Veseth (editor-in-chief) & Sue Veseth (contributing editor).